The story was no less eloquent for being, perhaps, apocryphal. When he was first elected to the Dail for Laois-Offaly in 1943 the archetypal parish pump politician, Oliver J. Flanagan, stood as an Independent on a monetary reform platform. He conducted his campaign on a bike which had "Here Comes Oliver" on the front and "There Goes Oliver" on the back.

After a while he joined Fine Gael and became a Parliamentary Secretary, the equivalent of a Minister of State. At an after-Mass meeting during the next election, a wag in the crowd shouted out: "What about Monetary Reform?" Oliver J. pointed to the State car parked beside the church. "The last time I was in this village, I was riding a bike. Now take a look at that Mercedes. That's what I call Monetary Reform."

Times may have changed, but for many politicians Monetary Reform is still primarily about flying along in the State car with a highly trained, highly paid garda to act as chauffeur, valet, babysitter and all-round family retainer.

The public got a glimpse into this privileged world this week when, after much evasion, the Minister for Justice, John O'Donoghue, explained that when his State car was stopped doing 86 m.p.h. in a 60 m.p.h. zone outside Castleisland in the early hours of September 11th last, the passengers were his wife, his children and a family friend returning from the All-Ireland hurling final in Dublin.

In the Dail and on RTE radio, moreover, the Minister implicitly admitted that the only unusual thing about the Castleisland incident was that it had got into the papers.

His statement that the State car was "used on the vast majority of occasions, to say the very least of it, by me for official business" suggests that there were other occasions on which Garda drivers were used for purely private purposes.

He also acknowledged that this was not the only occasion on which his car was stopped for speeding. "But", he added ominously, "I am saying, in no uncertain terms, that other ministers, in the past, including justice ministers, have been stopped and that some of them have certainly been stopped more than once."

That no former ministers rose to their feet to condemn this as an outrageous slur suggests that senior members of all the major parties share the same essential attitude: if everyone does it, it must be OK. Indeed, Alan Shatter, leading the Dail attack on John O'Donoghue for Fine Gael, was at pains to say that he was not criticising the Minister for the use by members of his family of the State car allocated to him for his official duties.

In the overall scheme of things, the events on the road to Castleisland may seem like small potatoes. But they reveal, in their own way, something important about the current state of Irish politics.

Yet again, the public is shown a political elite which does not quite believe that the law of the land applies to itself and which remains, in spite of all that has happened in recent years, utterly indifferent to the line between public office and private interests.

A Minister for Justice who rode to office on the catch-cry of "zero tolerance" can casually announce, almost as an after-thought, that there is no question of charges arising out of an incident in which his own driver massively exceeded the speed limit. And the use of public money and public property for entirely private ends is largely accepted as simply one of the privileges of office.

There was, in fact, further evidence of these attitudes this week when the Public Offices Commission published its report on the recent South Tipperary by-election. Though again the issue highlighted by the commission may seem relatively trivial, it involves flagrant breaches of the law and a distortion of the democratic system.

While most public concern about standards in politics tends to focus on what's inside some mythical brown envelopes, the issue here is the envelopes themselves. Specifically, the commission's concern is what TDs and their parties do with a facility that is provided to them at public expense, those green and white Oireachtas envelopes that don't need stamps because the taxpayer has already forked out for the postage.

In its guidelines for candidates before the by-election, the commission specifically pointed out to each of them that they were not allowed to use Oireachtas envelopes for sending out campaign literature: "The Commission is of the view that the use of free, postage paid, Oireachtas envelopes gives an unfair advantage at an election to those candidates who have access (either directly or indirectly) to this facility. Under the Oireachtas (Allowances to Members) Act, 1962, as amended, the use of pre-paid Oireachtas envelopes is confined to parliamentary duties."

Here it was in black-and-white from the official ethical watchdog: don't use the envelopes, it's against the law and it's cheating.

What happened? Each of the candidates of the three main parties went ahead and flouted the law. Fine Gael's Senator Tom Hayes was by far the worst offender, using £900 worth of postage-paid envelopes direct from Oireachtas stocks. The Fianna Fail candidate, Barry O'Brien, used £450 worth, supplied by Fianna Fail and "several Oireachtas members". Labour's Ellen Ferris used £31.50 worth.

Between them, and with the collusion of their parties, the three candidates thus took almost £1,400 worth of public money to which they were not entitled. In the great scheme of things, that may not be a very large amount. But if any ordinary citizen went into a post office and took that amount of stamps without paying for them, or fraudulently drew down that amount of social welfare payments, he or she would expect, if caught, to end up before a judge.

In this case, all the Public Offices Commission can do is to raise this matter with the Committees on Procedure and Privileges of the Dail and Seanad. The first of these august bodies is the one that gave Denis Foley a two-week paid holiday for having voted on the Bill to establish the Moriarty tribunal without declaring that he held an Ansbacher account.

The message that all of this sends out to the public is that politicians live in a parallel universe in which neither the inconveniences of ordinary life nor the laws of the land fully apply. In the real world, people travelling between Kerry and Dublin have to deal with the kind of experience which a caller to Marian Finucane's radio show on RTE contrasted this week to that of the O'Donoghues.

While the Minister was still refusing to say what had happened with his State car, she was setting out with her young baby from Tralee to Dublin on the train. Nearly nine hours and numerous mishaps later, without so much as a cup of tea in the meantime, she arrived in Dublin.

It's not hard to see why the O'Donoghue family would want to avoid such unpleasant possibilities. But it is hard to see why the public that faces them as a matter of course should allow those responsible for the state of the country to live in a different world.

Yet, if there was any doubt that the system of petty privilege remains impervious to public outrage, one need look no further than the great monetary reformer, Charles Haughey himself. Like three other former Taoisigh - Albert Reynolds, Garret FitzGerald and Liam Cosgrave - Haughey not only retains a State car and driver, but has his mobile phone bills paid by the Department of the Taoiseach at a combined annual cost of £7,039.

While the Moriarty tribunal estimates that he received £8.5 million from his business friends, the taxpayer continues to foot the bill every time he rings Charvet on his mobile to order a new shirt. The estimated average annual cost of Mr Haughey's mobile from 1997 to 1999 was £978.75, and another £417.45 of public money was spent upgrading the mobile in his car.

So entrenched is the culture of Mercs and Perks that we keep shelling out for the little privileges of a man who has been exposed as a cynic, a cheat and a liar. What Slobodan Milosevic would give for subjects so patient, generous and tolerant.

fotoole@irish-times.ie